Eleanor Roosevelt

Biography

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City in 1884 into the wealthy Roosevelt family and was a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. Both her parents died while she was a child. At fifteen she was sent to Allenswood Boarding Academy in London, where its headmistress, Marie Souvestre, shaped her outlook. In 1905 she married her distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt, and they had six children.

After Franklin was paralysed in 1921, she appeared in public on his behalf and built her own base in the Women's Trade Union League and the women's division of the New York Democratic Party. As First Lady from 1933 to 1945 she remade the role: she held regular press conferences, wrote the daily column "My Day", in 1940 became the first presidential spouse to address a national party convention, and pressed for civil rights for African Americans, wider work for women and help for refugees, sometimes disagreeing openly with her husband.

Widowed in 1945, she was appointed by Harry Truman as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. She chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights and led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. In the 1950s she lectured widely and remained a force in Democratic politics, and in 1961 John F. Kennedy named her chair of the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, a post she held until her death in New York in 1962.